Geek with an attitude

Oh my, it has been a while since I visited my Blog. While there were few worthy posts which I should have blogged about, that never happened. Recently, when I came across a post on OMG Ubuntu , about a new kernel patch which supposedly speeds up Linux, I just had to try it out. Its been a while since I've compiled my own kernel (these days I rely on stock Ubuntu), but after seeing the results myself thought it was very much blog worthy for me to share with you. First off, for the impatient or the unmotivated, let me point you to another post on Phoronix, which contains a video showing the night and day difference this patch brings. If your still not impatient, then you could wait for 2.6.38, which will hopefully have this, considering Linus's supportive comments , regarding the patch. Ok now for the glory details on getting this patch up and running. I did this on Ubuntu 10.10 but it should work the same for other Debian and Debian like distros as well as other popular distro...

Its been almost an year since I last blogged and what can I say, micro-blogging killed blogging for me. Even micro-blogging has got to a point, I don't do as much as I used to. Perhaps the end of web 2.0 or perhaps I'm getting too old for this :) Anyhow, getting back to the subject of this quick post, it seems splitting a git repo into two separate git repos is somewhat obscure and required a bit of googling around. Fortunately I came across this great blog post , but wanted to summarize it in one place (the author made me look at several pages to put it together). Say I have a git project called foo.repo which had a subdirectory called bar, that I now want to make its own separate git project called bar.repo. Current state foo.repo/ .git/ bar/ abc/ xyz/ target state foo.repo/ .git/ abc/ xyz/ bar.repo/ .git/ Step 1 : Clone existing repo as desired repo on the local clone $ git clone --no-hardlinks foo.repo bar.repo Step 2: Filter-branch and reset to exclud...

Fedora 10 (F10) was one of the best fedora release I've come to use. I liked it so much that I made it the default OS on my Mac Mini PPC. So naturally I was looking forward to the release of Fedora 11 (F11). But with a couple of release dates slipping, the wait was somewhat of a torture. This of course is to be expected with Fedora, I was told, because all good FOSS community software follow the philosophy "IT WILL BE RELEASED WHEN IT IS READY!" (oh and "RELEASE OFTEN" but thats beside the point :). Now before I give my first impressions, I must warn that if your a die hard Fedora fanboy, then please STOP reading. .... Even if your not please note that these impressions are based on the Fedora Live CDs (both standard and kde based) and I have yet to download the DVD release. I did not install the Live CDs but merely ran them Live and only for a short period of time (a little over an hour combined). I tested the Live CDs on both my older Acer TravelMate 4200 lapt...

SinhalenFOSS , the audio podcast we started a little over an year ago is now available as a vidcast . A couple of months back, I got a call from Dr. Ajantha and I was thrilled to hear of UCSC.tv , the latest venture by UCSC . I was even more thrilled when Dr. Ajantha invited us to produce the SinhalenFOSS podcast on it. Despite our enthusiasm, we soon learned how hard it was to produce the show as a vidcast. We were used to recording the audio podcast at our own time, sometimes in the car, sometimes at home or office or even on the road. We would sometimes answer phone calls from loved ones in the middle of the recording and edit that out. Our podcast was pretty much a basement operation by 3 sweaty guys :) So I guess the most difficult task was to make us presentable on video. To that extent, the UCSC TV crew has done a good job with makingup us! The next challenge was time management. While our audio show was roughly 1 hour long, it wasn't strictly 1 hour long. Sometimes we went ...

Kanchana, my wife had an old P4 machine from back in the days before we met. It was a PC House branded G-Max. Anyways, she's been wanting to fix it up and give it to her sister to use and so we'd figure it would be a good B' day gift for her. So last weekend, about this time, I was sweating it off trying to put it back together in time for April 25th, her B' day. We'll it began a couple of days earlier, 23rd to be exact, when we picked it up from her parents place and cleaned it up and tried plugging it in. For better or worse, nothing happened - nothing worked. At least this thing wasn't going up in smoke. I removed the casing which was slightly more difficult than usual as a result of the case design. You couldn't pull out the motherboard because the CPU fan hits the CDROM and you couldn't pull out the CDROM for exact same reason. So I removed the power supply, slid the motherboard and lifted it up once the CPU fan was in the clear. The fun part was ...

Considering it's been exactly 1 year since my last post, I pondered a bit on a title for this post. "The comeback", "Still live and kicking" or "I'm back!" sprang to mind. But then I realized I'd be fooling my self and you, if I even remotely meant this blog was going to be regularly updated. Hence a title which better reflects the current state of my blog and to an extent my life - pulling a long a day at a time. Now don't get the wrong impression - I'm not depressed! As some of you already know my life's gone through a few transformations. Hmm let me see, first there was the marriage, then moving to our own (rented) place, loosing my iPod touch (oh the drama), moving again to a bigger house, moving again to a new office, moving away from Gentoo, moving back to Gentoo, buying new iPod touch 2g, getting a new macbook, buying a few ps3 titles including guitar heros 3 and buying an actual guitar and taking up lessons. Ok so that las...

The Sinhala Bloggers Union is organizing a 24hrs Blog Marathon starting from 8pm local time today, 18th to the 19th. There are currently over 30 participating blogs, including our sister (or brother depending on where your from :) site sinhalenfoss.org . Each blogging site will be trying to reach a crazy difficult target of 96 posts! In otherwords, we're talking about a blog post appearing from each site every 15 min! Multiply that by 30+ sites and boy I hope the net doesn't crash :P The easiest way to catch all the fun is to constantly reload http://marathon.sinhalabloggers.com/ , the official blog aggregator (syndicator) for the event. But it doesn't stop there. These guys have created a custom Face Book application for the FB junkies, a twitter channel for twitter addicts like myself, a Yahoo Pipes mash up for the web services oriented and even IM based updates. If your interested in blogging in Sinhala Unicode, it might not be too late to enroll your self by contact...

If your a music lover and also inclined to discover new (&old) music then last.fm is the place to be. I've signed up a couple of months back and have really been enjoying music surfing. Thats right! similar to channel surfing last.fm is about discovering music based on what you like and what others who are like you like. There is plenty of research in this field, some of which are headed by the folks at lastfm, but what it essentially means is a good trip down music lane :) You can sign up for a free account and search based on artist or a tag such as pop , rock , jazz or female vocalist . In any case your search result becomes a virtual radio station which goes off on all sorts of tangents discovering similar artists or similar artists, tags and so on. When you hear a song you really like, you can express your pleasure by marking it as loved, or display your hate by banning it and you shall never hear it. You can also skip tracks, unlike web streaming radio but can not see...

Recently I've been trying to start a Blog and Podcast as a means of reducing the language barrier when it comes to learning and playing around with Free and Open Source Software, aka FOSS. So a couple of months back I started the Sinhalen FOSS Blog at Wordpress.com. The idea of the blog is really to introduce various aspects of FOSS such as howto's, command line tips/tricks etc. and provide a forum for other Bloggers to contribute related articles. In this regard, I am grateful to Lakmal and Kanchana for their contributions and hope more of you will take the challenge in installing Sinhala Unicode and getting in to the habbit of remembering to write in Sinhala :). Yes it can be a pain, especially with the current state of input methods. Yes there are always complexities in writing proper Sinhala. But as far as I'm concerned writing something is better than not trying at all. In this regards, I'd have to thank my mom who is my personal Sinhala specialist (she's go...

The following post was an April Fools Hoax :) While bits of it are true such as I did finally move away from Gentoo as my primary distro its got more to do with lack of time and laziness to reinstall gentoo. Hopefully I'll do another post on me moving to Kubuntu (Ubuntu + kubuntu-desktop package). I did find few annoyances but one should expect that running a beta software. I am happily using kubuntu with full desktop effects that is far superior that of Apple of Microsoft. I did buy the Mighty Mouse and Apple keyboard as mentioned I wanted a good portable bluetooth device and they worked effortlessly (almost :) on the latest Ubuntu 8.04. No Leopard's were harmed in creating this hoax as the desktop your seeing on my Acer laptop is actually a full screen screenshot sent to me by Siraj using his Mac notebook which I loaded before taking the picture. Its been a little over 3 years since I switched from Debian to Gentoo. I still remember my blog post titled " Goodbye Debian...

We had a nice couple of sessions on shell programming today at the LSF lab @ UCSC . Anuradha started off with a great introduction that set the stage for the rest of the day. I followed with my invent as I go style of presentation, which for the most part I believe (hope) made sense. Then Sapumal did the evening session on brining all of it together with an advanced session. There was a good geek crowd that filled the small LSF room where geeks were seen on chairs, couches, on top of tables and on their feet. All of the speeches and some interludes were recorded and could go up youtube if and when someone gets around to it. Overall it was a good first day and more will follow tomorrow. I have a session in the evening and will try to pop in and out between my usual Linux lectures at UCSC and the workshop. In the mine time, enjoy these few pics I took from day 1.

Dr. Ajantha came back from the "International Conference on Advanced Communication Technology" after submitting what appears to be our (that is myself and Wathsala's ) first paper at an IEEE conference. The subject of the paper which you can download and read here , is about a Next Generation Proxy caching system which fuses the idea of Cached content and Bandwidth utilization with web 2.0/x.0 trends. These ideas are the result of what we learned by implementing Bassa , an Open Source Next Generation Proxy Server (NGP) at UCSC . We are very excited about continuing our research and development to expand its scope.

Oh boy what a day it was! I spent a good 5 hrs at the Sri Lankan Airport cargo office on Friday trying to clear a 3" tiny piece of memory which I had ordered for my Toshiba L1 laptop. I didn't really expect this to be held by customs in the first place, considering its size, weight, cost and the fact it was a 256MB chip (quite outdated by todays memory standards). I was also misled by FedEx's tracking comments which gave no indication of the shipment being held at customs but stated that it was on its way for delivery. It was only when the courier guy came and handed a letter I knew what happened. What was more amusing was the next update on FedEx's tracking site - Goods delivered. I called up FedEx and they said in order for them to clear it I had to get apply for a VAT number which seemed like an unnecessary hassle. They did suggest I go to the customs and try to sort it out myself - thank you FedEx for getting me FedUp! So I made my way to Katunayake which turned o...

Its rare but sometimes it *can* happen. This is an important one to fix! If your running a GNU/Linux server (or desktop), running kernels from 2.6.17 - 2.6.24.1, it is HIGHLY recommended that you update the system using what ever package management system your distro provided, IMMEDIATELY. If not updated, your system could be at risk allowing a normal shell user to gain root access (i.e root exploit). A technical overview of the exploit and links to POC code and source code patch can be found here .

Last Friday, I had the privilege to attend a workshop on "One Lap Top Per Child" or OLPC as they call it, at HNB Towers. The OLPC is a marvellous piece of technology (note, I fell short of saying hardware). For instance it has a very low power processor that was developed by AMD to only consume 2 Watts of electricity, compared to 30 - 40W on other notebooks! The battery has a life span of 4,000 hours compared to about 2,000 on others and only costs USD 10 to replace it (costs about USD 60 - 100 on our laptops). The screen works great in both indoors and in bright sunlight where it consumes less energy and has a higher resoultion in a black & white mode. The screen's back light can be replaced easily without having to replace the whole LCD panel and it only costs 25 cents to replace! It has a WiFi like no other! It supports mesh computing, a standard known as 802.11s (as opposed to 802.11b/g). And still normal wireless devices are welcomed to connect as p2p devices (...

I've just come back from UCSC's roof top, where RMS came to say hi to the many geeks, students and staff as the last event before he heads back tomorrow noon. The last couple days had been quite hectic, balancing between home, work and organizing RMS events . From before his arrival on the 14th to the present day, its been a juggling act of trying to stay on top of things. It was challenging and non trivial considering the nature and importance of the visitor (after all RMS started it all ) and the fact we wanted to get so many different groups involved. There was ICTA, FOSS.lk (which in itself is a bunch of groups), SLIIT, UCSC, UoM, UoP, IIT, NIMB, APIT, PC House, Cannonical, Redhat, WSO2 and probably more. And looks like we pulled this one off quit well, phew! RMS arrived in Sri Lanka on the 14th of Jan and I ended up tagging along with Himira of ICTA/LKLUG to the airport. The flight was supposed to be at 11:45am and we were doing the whole CIP (Commercially Important Peop...

Right! so you had plenty of time to purchase the touch or the iphone and Steve had enough time to cut me a check for the previous 2 articles. But since the later didn't happen, lets just concentrate on the former - but this time in combination with GNU/Linux. Once the new line of ipods were released, it was soon obvious that third party media players, such as gtkpod/amarok/winamp, were no longer able to sync with them. Whether this was intentional or just a consequence of Apple improving things will depend on who you ask :) Fortunately though, (ipod Linux?) hackers managed to figure out a way to get syncing working again - in just a couple of days, might I add! Unfortunately the ipod touch/iphone is another beast altogether! Neither support the USB mass storage modes and instead rely on a proprietary message passing method that is yet to be deciphered.So AFAIK, neither of the two devices can sync over USB as far as gtkpod is concerned. Hopefully someone will figure it out or we may...

My command center went through a major overhaul this year a couple of weeks ahead of Christmas as I upgraded my 19" LCD monitor for 32" LCD TV. This was good because I now no longer need to juggle swap A/V cables when ever I want to switch between watching Dialog TV, Playing the wii and ps2. The BIG screen was fabulous but I was and still am a bit disappointed when viewing non HD content. Even though this Samsung TV is not that bad, its not so high end to have an upscaler needed to convert the image from 480i to 720p. Unfortunately as far as DialogTV goes, I'm going to have to be stuck with SVideo at best (actually Composite seems to have better quality where). On the Wii and the PS2 end, I'll have to try and get a component cable, which I could not find in SL. But still those two don't support full HD. On the otherhand, once you plug in the Mac mini via VGA, things looked great. Playing DVDs also works well because a computer can upscale video. Unfortunately my ...

I've been a kde user for very long time, since from before version 3.0. I vaguely remember being excited with version 3.0 to the point I was using the beta releases on a daily basis. Similarly I have been anticipating kde 4.0, the next major release since 3.0 I suppose. But it seems that is just its problem! Its too much of a major release to be pushing out in such a hurry. I have been following kde 4 from time to time by reading some of the discussions on the panel-devel list, trying out the alpha releases via the SUSE live cd and of course discussing with Siraj , our local kde developer, on the internals (technology and community wise). While things have improved a bit, with each release of kde 4, its far from ready. We are now at RC1 and the announcement says its ready for prime time testing. Building on this, the majority of applications included in KDE 4.0 are now usable for day to day use. The KDE Release Team has recently underlined this by calling on the community to par...

Previously on Part 1 ... Just kidding! Scroll down and read it your self. Its been a while, and I think I'm falling into the "Oh twittering is so much more easier than blogging" trap. So if you've been following my twitter , then you'd know that I've been discovering quite a few uses for the iTouch.Unfortunately its late and I think you'll have to wait for another post before I get into all that :( So instead, lets first cover some of the basics. Freeing up some space for 3 rd party Apps I'm assuming you have already setup the openssh package as well as the BSD Subsystem, there by enabling you to remotely login or copy files (scp). If not, use the Installer app to install those two packages. One of the problems you'll quickly realize as you begin to install more and more apps, is a pop up message notifying you that your running out of disk space! This is due to the root partition (/) which also happens to hold /Applications, being only 300MB. Most...